Beliefs about the origins & development of species, etc.

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Indicators 8 to 12 that evolution of the
species didn't happen, with rebuttals

If homo-sapiens evolved from extinct proto-humans, then why
is it so difficult to find skeletons of these species?

Rebuttal: Fossils are actually quite rare. When animals die,
they are usually consumed by their internal bacteria and by external scavenging
animals. Essentially all bodies will rot
and disappear. Only under very unusual circumstances will a body be preserved long enough
to be converted into a fossil.

Agraptalyte fossils are supposed to be millions of
year old index fossils, except that a number of them were found, still
alive, in the South Pacific three years ago!

Rebuttal: An index fossil is generally the fossil of a
species that is believed to have emerged at a certain time, and which
became extinct at a more recent, time that is also known. Thus the rock that it is
imbedded in can be roughly dated if the fossil is present. But this
assumes that the species actually became extinct at the time estimated.
All scientists had to go on was a complete absence of members of the
species in the fossil record. In this case, the species apparently did
survive in small numbers, and may even have produced a few fossils. However, scientists
were not sufficiently lucky to run across one of them. There are many
cases on record where species were declared extinct because they
hadn't been seen in decades. And then, decades later, a member of the
species is found. The Agraptalyte fossil in no way falsifies the theory of
evolution. It merely corrects the record of one species in the
evolutionary record.

If one species were to evolve into another, one
would expect that it would do so in many small, incremental steps. Thus,
many transition fossils would have been found by now. But, in fact, very
few have been discovered.

Rebuttal 10: Charles Darwin originally believed that evolution
was a gradual phenomenon. In fact, he wrote that if transitional fossils
were not found, that his conclusion about a slowly advancing evolution
would be false. Stephen Gould has proposed the concept of punctuated
equilibrium. This states that species tend to be relatively fixed over long periods
of time. When a transition from one species to another happens, it occurs relatively
quickly. Thus, transitional fossils would be extremely rare. He believes
that speciation generally occurs rapidly in small, isolated populations of
a species who have wandered away from the main "herd." Thus, surviving transitional fossils would be expected to be non-existent or
almost non-existent.

If humans evolved from apes,
then one would expect that there would be no apes left on earth; all would
have evolved into humans.

Rebuttal 11: Scientists have been trying to explain for over a
century that humans did not evolve from apes. Rather, humans and apes
share an ancient, common ancestor. Unfortunately, there are individuals who have
promoted creation science and spread confusion by
misrepresenting the theory of evolution.

It is generally believed by life scientists that new species develop
out of isolated colonies of an existing species. For examples, an isolated
colony of the human-ape common ancestor could have become separated from
the main body of the species. Genetic mutations happened which
changed the colony in the direction of "humanness". This had
survival value under the environmental conditions experienced by the colony. Perhaps the change was a higher intelligence, which came
in handy because the colony's environment was more challenging. A new
species developed which further evolved into modern man over an interval of
millions of years. Meanwhile another isolated colony of human-ape common
ancestors also become isolated. Genetic mutations happened which changed
the inhabitants in the direction of "apeness." For them, this
had survival value. Perhaps the change made them more effective tree
climbers, which came in handy because they happened to live in a more
densely forested area. They also evolved further into apes.

In short, humans and apes are still around because each has found its
own niche where it survives better than its competitors.

If our ancestors who lived, say, 80
million years ago were small mammals, then the human genome must be much larger
and more complex than the genome of our ancestors, back in the age of the
dinosaurs. But William Dembski's book "Intelligent Design" and Phillip
Johnson's book "The Wedge of Truth" both explain that there is no
possible mechanism by which the genome can increase in complexity; its total
information content is fixed. Thus, natural selection can produce microevolution
-- small changes with in a species. But, it cannot produce macroevolution --
major changes from one species to another.

Rebuttal 12: This is a suggestion that cuts to the heart of evolution, so we will discuss it in greater detail. The two authors cited above write that natural selection can only work by one of two processes:

Point mutations: the change of one DNA base for another.

Genetic recombinations: a reorganization of existing genetic
material into a different pattern.

The authors say that neither path can leads to an increase in complexity of the genome, which is necessary for small mammals to evolve into humans. They concluded that some form of supernatural entity
must have designed a new genome for each species. However, the authors have ignored two other processes. Both are observed in nature. Both lead to an increase in the genome's complexity:

Genetic duplication: Normally, genes replicate -- make exact
copies of themselves. But genes can occasionally duplicate themselves so
that a daughter cell ends up with "two copies of a gene sequence that
appeared only once in the parent cell." 1

Polyploidy: Here, gene replication takes place without the cell
dividing.

"These two copies [of a single gene] are then free to diverge, via
mutation, resulting in a daughter genome with a greater information content than
a parental genome...Gene duplication and its effects on the size of the genome
are discussed by Julian Huxley in his 1942 book "Evolution: The modern
synthesis"...almost every book that discusses both evolution and genetics
discuss [sic] this topic." 1 There are two obvious reasons for the beliefs that the authors have expressed:

They are unfamiliar with the basics of their specialty, or,

They are aware of these methods of duplication but choose to
pretend that they do not exist in order to lead their readers down the
garden path.

Neither of these explanations seems reasonable, so there is probably a third reason of which we are not aware.

Reference used:

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